‘I’ve never seen a whale that close’

A Sydney surfer survives a thumping from a 15 metre whale, knocking him unconscious in a brutal tail slap at Bondi Beach.

Just about the time Bishan Rajapakse was entering the water for a surf at Bondi on Sunday, wildlife officers down at Lakes Entrance in Victoria were breathing a sigh of relief.

For a day they had been monitoring a southern right whale that wandered into the Gippsland Lakes and became caught on a sandbar.

Fortunately that whale struggled free, because it would have been a diabolical rescue. Television footage showed it furiously heaving sheets of spray with its tail as it tried to move off the bar.

All the might and power of a right whale is assembled in the tail.

Advertisement

Foremost right whale scientist, American Roger Payne, spent decades watching them from cliff tops at Peninsula Valdez in Argentina, where he saw them under threat of attack by orcas and sharks.

"When approached by anything . . . they often flex their bodies laterally, holding the tail cocked for several seconds," he wrote in Among Whales. "It is an obvious threat display – readiness for a fight – like a person assuming a karate stance."

You will now receive updates fromBreaking News Alert

Breaking News Alert

The scything sweep of such a mass of muscle and bone makes it a frightening weapon, as footage of the Bondi slapper shows.

The surfers who crowded around this whale cannot have realised how close they were to serious danger.

Dr Rajapakse certainly didn't, reaching out to say "hey, how's it going" to 10 or 15 tonnes of wild animal one metre away from him, a second before it knocked him out.

Too often we assume too much about whales' temperaments. Even outright predators with big teeth like orcas seem to placidly accept our help, as did the pod stranded at Fraser Island last week.

We see humpbacks as benign and inquisitive. But they can be very protective of their young, and sailors have told harrowing tales of pods that appeared to threaten their yachts.

But right whales are in a class of their own. They can be very cranky.

Early Tasmanian colonial settlers feared crossing the Derwent, reporting right whales suddenly surging at them. Sydney diarist and First Fleet British marine officer Watkin Tench wrote of a whale, most likely a southern right, that chased down a small boat on Sydney Harbour and upset it, drowning two in 1790.

Early whalers targeted southern rights and were often lost to them too.

A group of South Australian commercial divers in 2002 came upon a southern right tangled in crab pots near Whyalla. They talked about the risks of entering the water, but decided to help.

One of the men, Damien Grimm, said the whale stayed calm while they worked to free it with nothing more than snorkelling gear and diver's knives.

At the time, a specialist on the species, Dr Stephen Burnell, just shook his head. "If others try what they did, I suspect we could see people seriously hurt or killed."

In the wake of the Bondi slap, NSW National Parks underlined rules that no surfer or swimmer should approach within 30 metres of a whale.

But a southern right can cover that distance in one breath and about 10 seconds.